Review: JAMES BLAKE - "Trying Times”

Listening to a James Blake record can't help but be considered a sensorial experience. You cannot listen while distracted while being consumed by something else.

You have to take the right time, the right space, the right sound. You can't listen to social media notifications, background noises, useless waste of time.

Only in this way can one slow down in life, can one find the right “Trying Times”, the time for a truce in which to prove that a different world exists, made of reflection, attention, quality, and not just speed and crazy algorithms.

I, as usual, before writing something, listened to it three times: Blake crossed me.

Blake has always inhabited that middle ground between the whisper and the glitch, but here his aesthetic becomes denser, almost material.

In England the expression trying times is an exercise in cynical modesty, an understatement that masks the abyss behind a shrug of the shoulders. It's a very British way of downplaying the disaster, perhaps because we have often meticulously engineered that disaster ourselves.

The opening, entrusted to Walk Out Music, it is a dreamlike manifesto, with an intensity highlighted by the sound of an 808 and a crazy synth which however do not attack. It is the perfect prelude to a descent into the depths, which gradually becomes more leaden Death Of Lovea song with impressive gravity and with a clear reference to Leonard Cohen, where the pain is not exhibited but sedimented. If I Had a Dream She Took My Hand plays with an almost anachronistic retro taste; it is in the title track that Blake's soulful soul transmutes into an ethereal spirit, a rarefaction that never loses contact with the earth.

There is an underlying tension that runs through the entire work. In Make Something Up reminiscences of the Eels echo, while the collaboration with Monica Martin in Didn't Come to Argue breaks continuity with a soulful change of pace, acting as a necessary counterpoint.

It is not a static disk. Days Go By reworks the classic grime of Dizzee Rascal, accelerating the urban pulse almost to the point of breakbeat, recalling how the concrete of London is always present even in the most abstract dreams. With Doesn't Just Happen, the piece with Dave, the rap envelops Blake's suspended system, moving on contemporaneity.

Closure is introspection and ecstasy. Obsession it is a dark room, an intimacy that borders on discomfort, then resolved by the suspended structure of Rest of Your Lifebased on a Dusty Springfield sample that transforms into dance floor euphoria, as if to exorcise the demons encountered along the way.

But the political heart beats in the conclusion Just A Little Higher. Between orchestrations and violins a lucid observation of collective stupidity arises.

Anger is fed from above. Division is a perfect tool for a capitalist system that thrives on conflict.

Blake does not point the finger at “the other”, but against the mechanism that wants us to be atomized and ferocious. It's an invitation to shift your gaze, to raise your frequency above the white noise of barroom nationalism.

“Trying Times” is not an easy-to-consume record, more from a sonic perspective than a lyrical one.

It is a work that requires a sound rendering. James Blake is telling us that respite is not the absence of noise, but the ability to find a melody within it, without being overwhelmed.

A work of disarming authority, which transforms British understatement into a form of artistic resistance.